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Music for Fantasy Fiction

ORGANOLOGY

When
writing science fiction, I like knowing what types of music my character enjoy.
I have even made my own fantasy instruments. This blog post looks at musical
instrument classification, with lists of instruments your characters might
play, but also touches on mixing.

Organology
is the study and classification of musical instrument families. The four main groups of musical
instrument are membranophone (drums), chordophone (bells, cymbals), idiophones
(guitars, violins) and aerophones (woodwind, brass).

There are five types of music range. They are the names given to
human voices but also apply to instruments. They are bass, baritone, tenor,
alto and soprano.

Human hearing range is 30 to 20,000 Hertz, but the comfortable
maximum upper limit is 2,000 - 5,000 Hz, which is C7. Humans lose 100 Hz every
year they are alive. Mathematically a 200 year old person would definitely be
deaf.

Middle C starts at C4.
Most riffs average in the C4 range, from 200 to 400 Hz. This means musicians
have somewhere to either drop or move up to.

Edit out C7 frequencies
and above, and those below C1, this is a preference as it's all I need. When
recording and producing, put filters on these high and low frequencies as they
will be unnecessary annoyances. 100 - 1,000 Hz is a very comfortable range,
this is C2 - C5.

The below table shows
instrument ranges, their respective types, and my given groups. The reason I
made this is because I would love to see people make electronic music with
classical ideas. Aphex Twin does this, and much more, but there isn’t enough in
my opinion.

I chose my own middle
octave for instruments. It helps simplify the editing process having suggested
peaks to pick out. Please note, some instruments are capable of playing out of
my given ranges. I wanted to show their relationship to each other within their
families in a constructive and useful manner for mixing.

If you cannot play the
notes, you can strive to pick them out in production. It’s useful for making
each orchestral instruments stand out. Remember, all of my given ranges are
approximations. Editing always needs fine tuning.

In this graph, CL stands
for Classical, EA is Early Romantic, LA is Late Romantic, MO is Modern and FO
is a fake folk orchestra. I needed something to give the other non-orchestral
instruments a chance. The violin is by far the most common instrument used in
orchestras.